Dream Log: January 17, 2002

first:

I'm somewhere, with L and someone else who annoys me almost as much as I like L. This is important to me at the time, but doesn't really figure into the plot. So it's dark out, and we're waiting for a storyteller to arrive. He arrives. His skin is the color of the truffles my roomate had a few weeks back: dusty, medium brown. For some reason L, the other guy and I separate. The storyteller's stories are for us alone. We somehow figure into the stories, and the storyteller does as well; somehow we're supposed to trick the storyteller through his stories. How I know this I don't know. It's a dream thing. I try to creep into L's bed with her before the storyteller comes into the room, but she stops me -- we have to play the game by the rules, apparently. The impression I have of the storyteller is of a trickster character. I don't get any more information.

and then:

I get up from bed. I need to pee. A lot. All of a sudden, I start knowing what's going to happen 15 seconds in the future. I run to the sink and start relieving myself. The urine begins to turn blue. Darker. Darker. Soon I'm pissing india ink. The spatters are mixing with water droplets and becoming purple. This has to be the longest piss in the history of the world. The weird thing about this dream is that everything is incredibly vivid -- the colors are bright and pop out against the beige tile; the relief I'm feeling is amazing. All of a sudden, as the urine is turning green now, I realize what's about to happen. I try to stop myself, but It's like trying to stop a car by dragging my sneakers on the ground now. I start pissing blood, now. It's horrifying, but I'm finally surprised at something in this dream: it doesn't hurt. I'm finally able to stop (after what seemed like 5 minutes of urination), which is when I wake up.

yeah, I needed to pee.

I was travelling through the city center. I'm not quite sure which town, but it got most of it's features from my home town, Cape Town. I was on a bicycle (In Waking Life I don't own one) pedalling at a fair speed along the elevated freeway (IWL this is not legal) that runs around the city center (IWL I don't work in that part of town.) This was a route that, in the dream, I was familar with to the point of routine. Perhaps I was going home from work.

I had come to the point where I got off the elevated freeway. I did this not by an offramp, but by a door into a building that abutted onto the road. I freewheeled down a spiral ramp, and rode out onto ground level.

I looked up.

I was looking up at two buildings. Two identical buildings, one on either side of me. Two very tall towers, very familiar looking, but not from Cape Town. I've seen them on TV often enough, though until I woke up they just seemed every-day normal, nothing significant or out of place. Though the sky was mostly blue and the sun was shining, there was a low cloud of white and grey mist filling the space between thier tops. A fine mist of rain was falling from the cloud (In reality, it was raining outside).

For some reason I then had to retrace my steps. I got back into the buildings, and located the elevator bank. I stood there, next to my bicycle, and asked people at which floor the elevated freeway exit was to be found, but no one would answer me. Some of them smiled but remained silent. I exclaimed loudly: "I've got to get to the 87th floor!"

Later that night I dreamed of food. B- and a friend of his were looking for food, but had none. However I looked through my rooms and gathered to together a decent quantity of snack junk foor. We all sat on a bed to eat. I noticed that he had a box of breakfast cereal. However the cereal in the box consisted of mlk-chocolate candy bars as long as my arm. It looked a lot like one of the snacks that I had found, only larger.

I started to eat one, and found it less sweet than I had expected, but with a strong cinnamon taste.

A food dream is a sign of strong hunger, and I have been deliberately restricting my food intake over the last few days. I havn't eaten much fat or sugar, which is what the candy bar was.

I just forced myself awake from terrible dreams about nuclear war. Started out as leftover from another dream; surreal story like a video game, details hazy now, but for some reason a nuclear missile hidden inside a moped. Lots of subways. Lighthearted. Traffic lights bearing down, like a net.
Then, later on, morphed into the war dream; walking down a suburban street, near the Wasatch front in Utah (suburban SLC) I knew it was coming.
Flash behind me, but the flash wasn't realistic. Slow, like molasses, white light wrapping around.
Enough time to hide in the lee side of a house, duck into a shadow.
The light burns on your skin. In my sleep, my skin was burning, like a horrible sunburn, wherever this phantom light touched it.
Somehow wound up sheltered with other people (celebrities? not as themselves, like as characters in a film, not everyone) in the house attic, though later the attic was the basement.
Seemed as if there was no destruction. Tried to get online (somehow no EMP knocked out computers) to tell people I was alive.
The house I was in was that of a personal enemy, played by the blonde Baldwin (when going back and linking, that makes me smile. It didn't at the time). Normally hostile, allowing us to stay 'cause of extraordinary circumstances. Trying to communicate to others (names of noders in IM buddy list). SEE A WHITE TOMAHAWK MISSILE fly lazily by the window. Pulls up, seeking. "It's happening again!"
Duck and cover, away from the light. Press into corners, by bookcases, by walls. Light comes in everywhere. Every crack, window. Can't get away entirely. Squeeze eyes closed, throw arm across face to keep from going blind. (I woke up with my arm pressed tightly across my eyes)
Again, no sound, no destruction (near us anyway), just horrible light, burning skin. It's night, suddenly. Go up to a cupola/widow's walk/gazebo on the roof.
A mushroom cloud is blowing toward us, up the street past us, like a tornado. Doing no serious damage, just being silentlly blown by.
Back downstairs, describing what I just saw. The father from American Pie is there.
Another flash, another duck and cover, then I force myself awake.
The dread is still in my skin, my face is heavy and I had to get this down.

Haven't dreamed about nuclear war in a long time. As a child of the eighties, thanks to Reagan, I used to have nuclear war nightmares all the time. Horrible dreams. I can't fathom what it must have been like to grow up in the fifties, with cheery propaganda films telling you how to "survive" this horrible insanity your government is subjecting you to for a pointless "bigger dick" contest. I think the dreams were my first political consciousness. I hated it so much. How could any government hold their people hostage like that? It was pure evil.

My eyes are teary. trying to breathe deeply, get it all out, let it go so I can go back to sleep. Going back to format and link up the above; hopefully that'll let it all fade.

I don't want any child to dream of nuclear war ever again.

enth posted (how the hell... ?) in my LiveJournal, giving me a link to sidereal netradio, because it played a song that he had been telling me about, I would presume. Although it may very well have been Psydereal's station, and not enth's.

And now for something completely different: FISH!
Symbiotic fish, at that. I don't know just what they were symbiotic with, but whatever it was laid eggs (which were neon orange, like that roe you always get at sushi restaurants) in the fish's ass. Lots of eggs. And this is a small fish.
So after a few days, the amount of shit and eggs in this fish's rectum is about to kill it, when the pressure pushes all of it out, in an explosion of shit and life.
I saw this on some nature show, and I'm pretty sure I was appalled.

(Not strictly a dream, but draw what conclusions you will)

Half-asleep at two minutes to six, I toss and turn in the darkness, visualizing a photo-negative woman faintly glowing. When my alarm goes off, and I am roused from this pseudo-dream, I feel lethargic, and angered at the cruel universe that forces me to be up at this awful time.
But suddenly, an epiphany comes to me, a vision of being but one soul in an endless multiverse, and I visualize many copies in different universes getting up at the exact same time. Most distinctly remembered are a cyberpunk version of myself rolling off of a dirty mattress, a feudal samurai me (in armor, no less) rising from a spartan cot, and me as a hard-bitten detective in the style of Bogart, waking in a cluttered office.
Oddly enough, I feel comforted by the realization that whatever hell I go through at this moment, I am not alone. Combined with a determination not to be the multiverse's slacker, I get up, stumble out of my half-asleep state, and promptly forget all about it until roughly an hour ago.

Strangely enough, I still feel happier in the knowledge and/or hallucination that I am not alone. I have no idea how the woman factors into things.

When Iwoke up this morning, I was confused as to whether my dream was a dream, or whether my dream was a cold reality and I woke up the next morning.

My dream was supposed to be just another day. Only this particular morning I was awakened not at my usual Christmas break time of noon, but at 6 a.m. My sister had barged in the room and started packing my clothes. Fortunately this odd turn of events got my mind going allowing me to wake up faster.

I ask my sister, "What's going on? What's the deal with my clothes? Where am I going?" She informs me that a midwestern town has been nuked (I never learned what the name of the town was). Overnight some missiles were lauched and we were packing up to leave Pittsburgh and head out to my grandparents rural town in central Pennsylvania.

Thanks to my sister, my bags were packed. We got in the car and headed to the country. Once we were there we had to turn on the news media. Of course there were lots of camera crews shooting the rubble of the once great midwestern city. This makes no sense since the fallout would justify keeping far away from ground zero.

It looked similar to Independence Day when the aliens used their weapon. I watched as fires tore through buildings and homes. There were people trying desperately to escape, but to no avail. The scene was too much. I had to forget about it for a while. I retired to my bed for some much needed mental rest.

The next thing I remember was waking up in my bed wondering how it was I had returned home. I was trying to determine what day it was. The questions arose as to the reality of my dream. Did it happen, or what is thankfully just a dream?

I adore naps, mainly because they are one of the few times I get to remember my dreams, even if only in fragments.

O-swirl and I had moved to Paris, into an estate right off the Champs-Élysées. Quite appropriately, my dream car (A blackish-blue BMW Z-8) was in the driveway, and we took a moment to adore the caramel vanilla sky, illuminating some gilded rooftops. The ruins looked more Roman than anything, and just as I realized this had to be a dream, Penelope Cruz walked up.

"Philippe! Summer! Welcome to the neighborhood! I live right one door over." Instinctively I knew that she often hosted Sushi parties attended by scores of celebrities. Without taking a breath, she named a score of A-list celebrities, many of which O-swirl is a fan of.

We were going to take a walk through the city, but my room-mate awoke me.
Originally I had planned to only take a nap, but the sky was so beautiful and my Love so happy that I decided I ought to go back to sleep, and attempt to continue the dream.

This, of course, didn't happen, and I dreamt of being at a version of Summer's apartment and having two people who still haunt me come over with intent of killing me. (In the Bedroom.) Lovely.